Readings

Last fall after the Taos Journey conference, Anne Focke and I got together to (as we say in California) process the event. She gave me a journal for my writing and a copy of a beautiful little chapbook, A Pragmatic Response to Real Circumstances, originally published by the back room, Portland, Oregon.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

One day we received a remarkable phone call: Two friends had just discovered an unpublished essay by the late Edna Lewis—one of America's most resonant and evocative food writers—that she had sent to a colleague years ago. A granddaughter of freed slaves, the late Edna Lewis left home when she was just sixteen years old and went on to become a renowned chef at Manhattan's star-studded Café Nicholson. Her books have spread the gospel of genuine southern cuisine and inspired a generation of home cooks.

Tell about the South. What's it like there? What do they do there? Why do they live there? Why do they live at all?

— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination, and the homeland of an array of Americans who consider themselves southerners. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.